tribe

Returning home

About 70 percent of the Nukak population remains displaced from their ancestral lands, according to the FCDS.

Most families have been pushed into sedentary lifestyles, settling in makeshift camps on the edge of towns, where addiction and child sexual exploitation became widespread.

Others have settled on small plots in rural areas, where tensions with settlers flared over land disputes.

“The settlers took over the land as if it were vacant. They say there were no Nukak, but what happened was that the Nukak got sick and left,” said Njibe.

In the most remote reaches of the Amazon, where the Nukak reservation is located, the Colombian government has little presence.

The Nukak, therefore, have few legal protections from settler violence when they try to reclaim their lands.

But in recent years, Nukak members like Njibe, tired of waiting for government action, resolved to return on their own.

The idea gained traction in 2020, when several clans retreated into the jungle for fear of the COVID-19 pandemic.

But after returning to their relative isolation, the clans considered staying for good. They called on nongovernmental organisations like FCDS for support.

At that time, Njibe was living on a small farm inside the limits of the Nukak Maku reservation.

Even within the reservation, decades of colonisation had razed large swaths of the forest. Grassy pastures dotted with cows had replaced the Amazon’s towering palm trees.

Deforestation had increased in the wake of a 2016 peace deal between the government and the FARC. The rebel group previously limited deforestation in the Amazon in order to use its dense canopies as cover against air surveillance.

But, as part of the deal, FARC — the largest armed rebel group at the time — agreed to demobilise. A power vacuum emerged in its place.

According to FCDS, powerful landowners quickly moved into areas formerly controlled by the FARC, converting the land into cattle pastures.

Armed dissident groups who rejected the peace deal also remained active in the area, charging extortion fees per cow.

“The colonisation process has caused many [Nukak] sites to be either destroyed or absorbed by settler farms,” said a FCDS expert who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation.

Still, in 2022, the FCDS forged ahead with a pilot programme to support seven Nukak communities as they settled deeper into the reservation, where the lush forest still remained. There, the Nukak hoped they could revive a more traditional, if not completely nomadic, way of life.

But many of the expeditions to identify permanent relocation sites failed.

Initially, Njibe hoped to move to a sacred lake inside the reservation that he recalled from his childhood, but once he arrived at the site, he found that it was now part of a ranch.

When he asked the settler who ran the ranch for permission to stay there, the rancher rejected his request, and Njibe was forced to choose another place to live.

He considered returning to a forested area — about 24 hectares (59 acres) wide, roughly the size of 33 football fields — that he considered his childhood home.

But that too lay within a ranch. This time, however, the settler in question, who Njibe said was more sympathetic to his land claims, allowed him to stay.

Two tribal nations filed a lawsuit saying that the federal government used the trust fund money of tribes to pay for boarding schools where generations of Native children were systematically abused.

In the lawsuit filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, the Wichita Tribe and the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California said that by the U.S. government’s own admission, the schools were funded using money raised by forcing tribal nations into treaties to cede their lands. That money was to be held in trust for the collective benefit of tribes.

“The United States Government, the trustee over Native children’s education and these funds, has never accounted for the funds that it took, or detailed how, or even whether, those funds were ultimately expended. It has failed to identify any funds that remain,” according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit was filed against Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Bureau of Indian Education. A spokesperson for the Interior declined to comment on pending litigation.

In 2022, the Department of the Interior, under the direction of Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American to run the agency, released a scathing report on the legacy of the boarding school era, in which Native children were stolen from their homes, forced to assimilate, and in many cases physically, sexually and mentally abused. Countless children died at the schools, many of whom were buried in unmarked graves at the institutions.

That report detailed the U.S. government’s intentions of using the boarding schools as a way to both strip Native children of their culture and dispossess their tribal nations of land.

The tribes are asking the court to make the U.S. account for the estimated $23.3 billion it appropriated for the boarding school program, detail how that money was invested, and list the remaining funds that were taken by the U.S. and allocated for the education of Native children.

Last year, President Biden issued a formal apology for the government’s boarding school policy, calling it “a sin on our soul” and “one of the most horrific chapters” in American history. But in April, the administration of President Trump cut $1.6 million from projects meant to capture and digitize stories of boarding school survivors.

Brewer writes for the Associated Press.

At the Mount Hagen Festival in Papua New Guinea, Janet met a community of people with a living connection to one of the darkest aspects of Papua New Guinea’s recent history – cannibalism

A dark tourist who has travelled to the furthest corners of the Earth met a tribe with a cannibal past at one of the “craziest, weirdest” events she has ever been to.

In recent years, Janet Newenham has really been clocking up the miles. The 38-year-old from Cork leads groups of women to strange and largely inaccessible places, including the alien-treed Socotra Island off the coast of Yemen and the ultra-advanced Chinese city of Chongqing.

However, few places could prepare her for the Mount Hagen Festival in Papua New Guinea, where hundreds of tribes from all over the island come together to showcase their traditional clothing, dances and games. It is a riot of colour and movement, unlike anything else in the world.

There, Janet met a community of people with a living connection to one of the darkest aspects of Papua New Guinea’s recent history – cannibalism.

By all accounts, the practice no longer occurs in the country, with the last well-documented incidents taking place in the 1960s. One of the last reported cases unfolded in the malaria-infested swampland of Sepik, a 45-minute plane ride from the city of Mount Hagen.

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It “was in 1964 when a group of men raided a neighbouring village for meat – as their ancestors had for thousands of years. All seven offenders were hanged by ‘kiaps’ – Australian patrol officers who were the law of the land until PNG’s independence in 1975,” wrote Ian Neubauer in 2018 following a visit to the region.

One tribe that also partook in cannibalism in the same decade is the Asaro people, who are known as the Asaro Mud Tribe.

“If people did them wrong or tried to steal their animals, often they would kill a member of the opposite tribe as punishment,” Janet told the Mirror following her visit. “They stopped more than 50 years ago. They said all tribes stopped in the 1960s.

“We did also meet other tribes that touched on it. And explained it was only ever to honour their family or to exact revenge on another tribe if they had killed someone.”

The timeline means that there are a handful of older members of the Asaro living today who were involved. “It wasn’t scary (to meet them), but the more you think about it, it is crazy to think that they have eaten people,” Janet added.

The reputation of the Asaro stretches far beyond the borders of Papua New Guinea, and not just because of their unusual past. Their cultural dress has also caught the eye and inspired many copycats. “They are covered in mud and they wear these really heavy masks designed to scare away their enemies,” Janet explained.

The history of the look is mired in confusion, but it is unlikely to be as ancient as one might suspect. In fact, some historians believe it had its origins in the 1950s.

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“According to one theory, some time ago, Asaro people were hiding from their enemies from another tribe near a riverbank of white clay. The Asaro got covered in clay and mud, and their appearance frightened the opponents, as in the traditions of the tribes, only the ghost can be white. But the legends of the Asaro people still do not explain why this tradition became so important for them, or how they got bamboo claws on their fingers,” writes the Journal News.

“Another version says that once, during a wedding of one Asaro, one man came in a strange costume with a terrible mask and clay on his body. Everyone thought he was a ghost, so they fled.”

According to research conducted in September 1996 by Danish anthropologist Ton Otto from Aarhus University, the Mudmen tradition is an invention of the Asaro people. Its current elaborate form evolved from a 1957 cultural fair, when the Asaro debuted the look, Otto claims.

Over the years, the tribe has used events such as Mount Hagen to show off and perfect their costumes and dances. However, this has given others the chance to copy the striking get-up.

Recently 29-year-old subsistence farmer Kori from Komunive village told the BBC of his concerns over plagiarism.

“The government does not recognise or protect our ownership rights and everyone in the highlands is now claiming to be a mud man,” he says. “But it’s our story and the others have copied it from us. It is a big worry for us because we don’t have any copyright protection.”

James Dorsey visited the Asaro five years ago and heard how an older member of the tribe relocated to a different part of the highlands in the late 20th century, which brought him into contact with other groups. From them, he learned the practice of bakime: using a disguise to take revenge on an enemy.

The returning elder introduced the method of covering one’s face with white tree sap as a disguise. This then morphed into girituwai, whereby a light wooden frame with a mud-soaked bag covering it engulfs the entire head. These were a part of the inter-tribe “spearing raids to capture pigs and women” that were common until the mid-20th century, Geographic Expeditions reports.

“In an effort to curb this cultural violence, in 1957 local organizers put on what was called the “First Eastern Highlands Agricultural Show,” and they invited the Asaro to participate. The tribal chairman at that time, Ruipo Okoroho, saw an opportunity to put the Mud Men on the tourist map. Organizing all of the local headmen, he had them wear, for the first time, the prototypes of today’s Papua New Guinea masks, large, surreal, and weighty,” the publication continues.

“The story goes that the day of the first Sing-Sing, as the show is popularly called, over 200 masked Mud Men stalked slowly onto the grounds, driving a screaming and terrified audience before them. No one had seen anything like them, especially not in such numbers. The Mud Men took first prize for tribal representation that year and the following two years, prompting an end to all such competitions in the future.”